SOA-C02 Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation Practice Question
A SysOps administrator needs to deploy a new version of an application to an Auto Scaling group using a blue/green deployment strategy. The application runs on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Which AWS service should be used to automate this deployment?
⚠ Common exam trap
SOA-C02 often tests the boundary between orchestration services (CodePipeline) and the actual deployment engine (CodeDeploy), causing candidates to pick CodePipeline because it 'automates deployments' when the question asks which service performs the blue/green mechanics.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
AWS CodeDeploy
AWS CodeDeploy is the service designed to automate application deployments, including blue/green deployments to EC2 Auto Scaling groups behind an Application Load Balancer. It supports the blue/green deployment type natively for EC2/on-premises compute, allowing traffic to shift from the original (blue) environment to a replacement (green) environment with configurable traffic rerouting and rollback. This directly matches the SysOps requirement.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Why it's wrong here
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a fully managed platform-as-a-service that owns the entire environment lifecycle, including the Auto Scaling group, load balancer, and EC2 instances it provisions. It cannot deploy a new application revision onto an existing, independently managed Auto Scaling group, since it expects to manage that infrastructure itself. For a targeted deployment with traffic shifting to a pre-existing ASG, CodeDeploy is the appropriate service.
- ✓
AWS CodeDeploy
Why this is correct
AWS CodeDeploy is the dedicated application deployment service that performs in-place or blue/green deployments with configurable traffic routing (canary, linear, or all-at-once). When deploying to an EC2 Auto Scaling group, CodeDeploy creates a new auto-scaling group for the green fleet, installs the revision, and then shifts traffic via the attached load balancer. This gives the administrator fine-grained control over the rollout and rollback behavior.
- ✗
AWS CodePipeline
Why it's wrong here
AWS CodePipeline is a continuous delivery orchestrator that chains stages such as source, build, test, and deploy, but it is not itself a deployment engine. While a CodePipeline stage can invoke AWS CodeDeploy as an action provider, the actual deployment and traffic shifting mechanics are performed by CodeDeploy. Therefore, choosing CodePipeline alone would not satisfy the requirement to deploy with traffic routing.
- ✗
AWS CloudFormation
Why it's wrong here
AWS CloudFormation provisions and manages infrastructure resources as code, but it does not inherently shift application traffic during a blue/green deployment. Although CloudFormation can update Auto Scaling groups and load balancers, it would require custom resources or external hooks to orchestrate traffic shifting. The service most directly designed for application deployment with blue/green routing is AWS CodeDeploy.
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Same concept, more angles
1 more way this is tested on SOA-C02
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. A SysOps administrator wants to deploy a new version of an application to an existing Auto Scaling group of Amazon EC2 instances. The deployment must minimize disruption by launching new instances, performing health checks, and shifting traffic to the new instances before terminating the old ones. Which AWS CodeDeploy deployment configuration should the administrator choose?
easy- ✓ A.Blue/green
- B.Rolling
- C.AllAtOnce
- D.Canary
Why A: The blue/green deployment configuration in AWS CodeDeploy is designed to minimize disruption by provisioning a new set of instances (green environment), performing health checks against them, and then shifting traffic from the old instances (blue environment) to the new ones before terminating the old instances. This matches the requirement of launching new instances, health-checking, and shifting traffic before termination, which is not possible with in-place deployment types like rolling or all-at-once.
JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Amazon Web Services exam blueprint
This SOA-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the SOA-C02 exam.